User blog:Kombatgod/New link table row templates (L1, L2 and Lx)
The saga of the redlink removal continues!! After a lot of tought and some tries, I basically changed my mind on the thing. Just to put you up to speed in case you haven't read my previous posts: I removed redlinks in the tables by using the #ifexist function to smartly only link the pages that exist, however that function can only be called 100 times in each page, meaning it will stop working past a certain point, and pages won't be linked. At first I decided to basically leave things as they are now, but also add split tables in different subpages. Well, I think I came up with a better idea: I created three new templates *'L1' will automatically link the series name in the table. *'L2' will automatically link the detailed link page (the "X" page). *'Lx' will automatically link both. So basically I implemented what I called solution 5 in the previous post. As I said, this creates a consistency problem, but I think we can deal with that. Also I might still add subtables to some pages that need or deserve them. These new templates WILL create redlinks if used to link a page that doesn't exist, but here's the thing: we only use them when we know the page to exist. Basically, if we see the category Pages with too many expensive parser function calls to be automatically added to a page, we start replacing the "L" templates with these other three, when we know the respective linked page to be there. We don't need to replace all templates in the page, but only enough to lower the function calls, so that the page is no longer in that category. I already tried this in the Donkey Kong page, and it seems to work perfectly. One last note: these new templates replace the function call only when the page exists, they still call it when it doesn't exist (meaning L1 still calls the function on the "X" page, and L2 still calls it on the series' name). This means that if a page has few existing link, the nonexisting ones might still be too many to work properly, but once we replace all existing links, the problem of the function not working will be unrelevant, since it will only leave unlinked pages that don't exist. I made this choice deliberately, to make these templates safe: by using them you don't risk of "blocking" a potential link as a non-link; if you call L1 because you know the series name exists, but the "X" page doesn't, L1 will still automatically link the "X" page as soon as it's created. (unless, of course, it's at the bottom of a page with too many function calls despite the template change) I hope I explained all this well enough. Either way, you can keep on using the old "L" template freely, these will only come in for emergencies. As always, let me know if you disagree with anything or don't like something, also about the other changes I made previously. Category:Blog posts